Political Activism 2.0: Comparing the Role of Social Media in Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” and Iran’s “Twitter Uprising”

Mohammed El-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis

CyberOrient,
Vol. 6, Iss. 1, 2012

Abstract

Social media, particularly blogging, Facebook and Twitter, have played a key role in instigating, accelerating and even organizing some of the uprisings and revolutions that have been taking place all over the Middle East. This role has been effective in galvanizing the youth and empowering them in their fights against repressive regimes and their plight for more freedom and independence. This study looks into the social media role in the so-called “Facebook revolution”, which took place in Egypt in January 2011 and the so-called “Twitter uprising”, which took place in Iran in June 2009. The Egyptian revolution did succeed in toppling the regime, while the Iranian uprising failed. Why did the calls for political change that started in the virtual world lead to actual change in the real world in Egypt but not in Iran? This study addresses this question by providing a critical analysis of the available literature and interviews with online activists in Egypt and Iran. The authors used the SPIN model (Segmentation, polycentrism, integration and networking) as a theoretical framework and concluded that the model helped social media succeed in Egypt, but not in Iran.

The
Middle East has been witnessing a tremendous growth in digital communication
technologies in a way that has made it possible for political activists to get
their message across through social media to different segments of the youth in
a fast and efficient manner. "These social networks inform, mobilize,
entertain, create communities, increase transparency, and seek to hold
governments accountable" (Ghannam 2011:4).

The
Internet has allowed large masses of Middle Easterners to solidify their
efforts and organize protests in a short amount of time. "It also provided a
platform for people to express their solidarity, both within...[their respective
countries] and with others in the region and beyond" (The Arab Revolution and
Social Media 2011).

According
to Time magazine, close to one-third
of the Middle Eastern people are under the age of thirty with high educational
levels, but with no clear prospects for the future. Many of them turn to the
Internet to express their frustrations and dissatisfaction with problems that
they face on a daily basis, such as unemployment, tough economic conditions and
government corruption. They have utilized the Internet "to rally the populace
to their cause" (Tung 2011).

Thanks
to the Internet, a new category of "online citizenry" or "netizens" has started
to surface in the Middle East. This category of young and politically aware
citizens, who are technology-savvy, has set a new vision and a more promising
political map for the region (Kuebler 2011).

However,
this optimism should be calculated rather than exaggerated, and there needs to
be some caution in assessing the new technologies' abilities to initiate
political transformation in a region like the Middle East, which has been subject
to decades of suppression under various dictatorial regimes.

There
is no question that different forms of social media have served as a venue for
average Middle Easterners through which they joined efforts with human rights
organizations and mobilized larger segments of the public (Tung 2011). But the
outcome of utilizing social media for political purposes is not always going to
favor the proponents of political freedoms. In fact, the impact of social media
in this context is closely tied to the socio-political circumstances in
individual countries.

This study compares the role of social media,
or cyberactivism, which Philip Howard (2011:145) defines as: "the act of using the
internet to advance a political cause that is difficult to advance offline", in
the so-called "Twitter Uprising," which took place in Iran in the aftermath of
the controversial presidential elections in June 2009 and the so-called
"Facebook Revolution," which took place in Egypt on January 25, 2011 and led to
the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak's regime after approximately thirty
years in power. Despite the fact that social media, particularly the forms of
microblogging such as Twitter and Facebook, played an integral and visible role
in both uprisings, their outcomes were completely different. Therefore, it is
important to ask whether social media were "the key enabler of...[the Iranian
uprising and the Egyptian revolution], or [were they] more of an accelerator?"
(Himelfarb 2011).

The
study addresses the abovementioned question using the SPIN model (Segmentation,
polycentrism, integration and networking) as a theoretical framework.for comparing
the role of social media in Iran and Egypt. Kuebler (2011) argued that "the
comparative method is...best suited [in these types of studies] to avoid the
danger of conventional wisdom and instead acquire a systematic vision of the
phenomenon by putting it into the concrete political context of the country in
question."

Social
Media: Between Cyber-Utopianism and Political Realism

Social
media, which rely on computer-generated content, can be defined as "the set of
tools, services, and applications that allow people to interact with others
using network technologies" (Brussee and Hekman 2011). Since the introduction
of social media, there has been a debate "between the polar opposites of
cyber-utopian and cyber-skeptic-where one side hailed social media and the
Internet as liberators, and the other as tools used increasingly by
authoritarian regimes to attack and intimidate dissident voices" (Himelfarb
2011). However, the social media role in the recent uprisings in the Middle
East has shifted the debate to "a more nuanced discussion around the
characteristics of...[social media]: enabler or accelerator" (Himelfarb 2011).

Morozov
(2011) calls the attempt to assign too much power to new media
"cyber-utopianism" or "Google Doctrine," which is based on the strong and
unquestionable belief that cyber technology has almost unlimited powers and
that it can eventually liberate any people from state repression.

But the social media powers are not unlimited.
Cyber-utopians tend to downplay the governments' role in censoring social media
or even utilizing them to serve their purposes. The Internet's open nature
allows governments to track down their opponents. "Governments create
cyber-armies of hackers to discern possible enemies and send secret police to
abduct these people during the night...Though many believe their comments online
are safe since they are anonymous, what they do not realize is that the
government has many ways of ripping off the 'protective' mask of anonymity to
reveal the speaker of any comment" (Tung 2011). Many governments are trying to
cope with the political dissidents' use of sophisticated cyber technology by
developing new, advanced and up-to-date techniques to closely monitor and
intercept the opposition's interaction and communication in the online world.
In a way, social media have strengthened rather than weakened the status of
several authoritarian regimes (Shirky 2011).

Morozov
(2011) argued that it should not be a given or an automatic assumption that
social media, in and by themselves, will eventually push for political changes,
introduce transformations to societies and liberate them from repressive
regimes. The belief in this deterministic scenario, according to Morozov, is a
form of "cyber-naïveté" and "slacktivism," which exaggerates or overestimates
the Internet power and ability to change at a time when this may not be the
case in reality.

Echoing
the same thought, Hands (2011:38) criticized technological determinism as a
"fatalistic resignation to technology. Instead, he called for a more effective,
non-deterministic approach to studying technology, which he described as a
"critical theory of technology." According to this theory, Internet technology
is "a product of human society and culture - as socially constructed" (Hands
2011:23). This social-constructivist theory highlights the continuous
interaction and coordination between technology and society.

In
this context, El-Nawawy and Khamis (2009:55) argued that "the virtual community
is an extension of the real community, and the meaning and values of a virtual
community are derived from the participants in that community. In other words,
virtual communities do not function as isolated entities, but they are the
reflections of human cultural and social values".

Studying
the environment in which social media operate is part of what can be described
as "cyber-realism," which rejects the notion that "radical shifts in the value
system of the entire policy apparatus could or should happen under the pressure
of the Internet alone" (Morozov 2011:319). Along the same lines, Shirky (2011)
argued that the use of social media, such as blogs, SMS, Facebook and Twitter
"does not have a single preordained outcome." It depends on the political and
social circumstances in each individual country. The potential of social media
to initiate political change is dependent upon the activists' motivation to
utilize the conditions in their societies in a way that makes change viable
(Bennett 2003).

The SPIN
Model

The
theoretical model that best explains the political movements' ability to
organize and initiate change on the ground is the SPIN model, which was
introduced by Gerlach and Hine in 1968 and updated by Gerlach in 2001. This
model explains the structure of organizations that are "segmented, polycentric,
integrated, networks" (Bennett 2003:22).

Segmentation

Segmentation
refers to the open boundaries between diverse civil society groups, "which grow
and die, divide and fuse, proliferate and contract." (Gerlach 2001:289).
Activists can be members in more than one group or segment simultaneously, and
"may join and separate over different actions, yet remain available to future
coordination" (Bennett 2003:22).

Polycentrism

Polycentrism
means "having multiple, often temporary, and sometimes competing leaders or
centers of influence" (Gerlach 2001:289). The polycentric groups are "many
headed," and they "are not organized in a hierarchy; they are 'heterarchic.'
They do not have a commander in chief. There is no one person who can claim to
speak for the movement as a whole, any more than there is one group that
represents the movement" (Gerlach 2001:294).

Integration

Integration
refers to "the horizontal structure of distributed activism...The integrative
function is provided by personal ties, recognition of common threats,
pragmatism about achieving goals, and the ease of finding associations and
information through the Internet" (Bennett 2003:22). The awareness of a common
enemy "helps diverse movement groups to unite and to expand...As 'underdogs,'
they must put aside their differences and work together" (Gerlach 2001:299).
Social media, with their openness and non-hierarchical structure, can give a
boost to horizontalism within politically-oriented networks (Mason 2011).

Networks

And
finally, networks are the natural consequence of the abovementioned aspects.
These networks have "overlapping membership, joint activities...and shared ideals
and opponents" (Gerlach 2001:290-291). "Networking enables movement
participants to exchange information and ideas and to coordinate participation
in joint action. Networks do not have a defined limit but rather expand or
contract as groups interact or part ways" (Gerlach 2001:295-296). "Since the
social network linkages are nonhierarchical, information exchange is relatively
open" (Bennett 2003:22).

The
movements that share the aspects included in the SPIN model have the ability to
avoid government's suppression, to stand strong in the face of opposition and
adjust their strategies to cope with any changing conditions on the ground.
Moreover, these movements, which emanate from the civil society, "will survive
and even become more active...when others are removed, retired, or co-opted"
(Gerlach 2001:303).

The
SPIN model, which has the ability to generate and instigate socio-political
change can help explain the course and outcomes of the Iranian uprising that
took place in 2009 and the Egyptian revolution that took place in 2011. The
political conditions and organizational structures in Iran are very different
from those in Egypt. These differences can be highlighted and clarified in
light of the SPIN model. In this context, it is worth highlighting the fact
that the SPIN model itself cannot create political change. However, the model
helps explain and contextualize the circumstances that lead to political
change.

Assessing
the SPIN Model in the so-called Iran's "Twitter Uprising"

In June 2009, major Iranian cities,
particularly Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, witnessed street protests to complain
about the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections in which the incumbent
candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beat opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi,
who served as Iran's prime minister from 1981 to 1989 (Kamalipour 2010). These
demonstrations, which took place despite an official ban on political activism
and public protests, "reflected a growing gap between what observers referred
to as Iran's 'hardliners' headed by the current Iranian government and the
'reformists' led by Mousavi" (El-Nawawy 2010:4).

The
protests, which were part of what was described as the "Green Movement,"
started out as peaceful, but became bloody after the regime opened fire on the
demonstrators. These protests attracted the world media attention (Kamalipour
2010). The Iranian government imposed a media blackout after the elections'
results were announced on June 12, 2009. Despite this blackout, social media
particularly YouTube and Twitter, were flooded with amateur images and videos
of the victims of police brutality on the Iranian streets (Sabety 2010). One
such video was that of Neda Sultan, a young female Iranian activist, who was
shot to death by the Iranian police. Videos of her bleeding to death
overwhelmed social media, turning her "into one of the most well-known images
of the [Iranian] regime's brutal repression" (Milani 2009). The killing of this
young woman, who became a household name inside and outside Iran, further
galvanized the demonstrators who carried slogans such as "We are all Neda"
(Afshar 2010:247).

Iranian
officials tried to discredit the claim that Neda Sultan was shot by the police.
Instead, the regime circulated another claim through social media that Neda was
fatally shot by one of her fellow protesters (Malek 2010). This reflects the
Iranian regime's effective use of social media to counter the opposition's
online activism.

In
general, social media mobilized the Iranian activists and provided them with a
forum through which they could express their views. In this context, Fatemeh
Keshavarz, an Iranian professor and activist who runs a blog called "Windows on
Iran," said (personal communication via e-mail, April 20, 2011) that "social
media made the
Iranian citizens feel empowered and in some way in control of their lives. It
also helped the western world, particularly the United States, to see that the
Iranian society was far from the machines of ideology blinded by faith and
ready to blow up the world."

The
protests lasted for several months, and despite the graphic images of dead and
injured protesters that were circulated through social media, the protests
failed in achieving their objective [of changing the course of the elections
and ending the rule of Ahmadinejad], and the regime "eventually regained
control of the political sphere" (Sohrabi-Haghighat 2011).

The
increasing social media role in Iran is a reflection of the tremendous growth
of the Internet, which was introduced in the country in 1993. Between 2001 and
2009, Internet usage in Iran saw a 48-percent annual increase. "Recent
statistics indicate there are more than 33 million Internet users in Iran
amounting to 43.2 percent of the population...Reports indicate that there are
about 700,000 Iranian bloggers and that 60,000 blogs are updated routinely in
Iran" (Sohrabi-Haghighat 2011).

While
Google and Yahoo are popular in Iran, Twitter was the medium of choice for
covering the 2009 protests throughout the summer of 2009, and the hashtag
"#IranElection" became very popular among Twitter users who mostly came from
the global community outside Iran. This could be attributed to Twitter's
flexibility, simplicity, openness and ability to get around government
censorship (Carreiro and Hirji 2009). "Hopes [in Twitter] were high to the
extent that commentators were calling the uprising a 'Twitter Revolution'"
despite the fact that the protests did not lead to a full-fledged revolution
(Sohrabi-Haghighat 2011). The high expectations regarding Twitter role prompted
the U.S. State Department to ask Twitter to postpone a scheduled upgrade in the
server so that Iranian online activists can utilize Twitter without
interruptions (Burns and Eltham 2009).

Despite
its advantages, Twitter had a downside. "As an organization tool, it is far too
public a forum to plan out protests or any anti-government activity." That is
why, it was easy for Iranian officials to use it to spread fake information
about the protests and to track down and arrest protesters through their
Twitter accounts (Carreiro and Hirji 2009).

While
it was hard for the Iranian government to completely block Twitter because of
its "open-ended design" that allows access from various locations, the
government blocked other forms of social media. It is known that "Iranian
government operates what has been described as one of the most extensive
filtering systems in the world" (Yigal 2009). In this context, Golnaz
Esfandiari, an online Iranian activist and senior correspondent for Radio Free
Europe based in Washington, D.C., said (personal communication, March 12, 2011,
Doha, Qatar). that:

Iran
has one of the world's toughest filtering techniques after China. Iranian
government officials proudly announced that they filter tens of thousands of
websites. Even blogs belonging to conservatives get filtered. If you look at
Facebook, you will see some fake accounts that belong to government people who
created these accounts to publicize for the government. They want to make
friendships with the average Iranians through these pages to check what they
are writing and who their other friends are. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah
Khamenei has a Twitter account, and those people who work on his account are
really good. Whenever he has a speech, they start tweeting his speech very fast
in three or four languages.

The
Iranian officials also sent out text messages to the protesters to warn them
against taking to the streets. In addition, the regime "formed a high-level
twelve-member cybercrime team and tasked it with finding any false information
- or, as they put it, 'insults and lies' - on Iranian websites. Those spreading
false information were to be identified and arrested" (Morozov 2011:10).

The
Iranian government's sophisticated and organized efforts in utilizing the new
media to its advantage and co-opting social media were complemented by the
religious foundation in Iran, which relies on the Shi'a clerics' rule, emanating from the "Velayat-el faqih" or the "Guardianship of Islamic Jurists" that
controls most forms of Iranian politics and society. In his explanation of the
religious foundation's impact on the Iranian uprising, Mohammed Ali Mohtadi, a
researcher at an independent think-tank called the Middle East Center for
Strategic Studies in Tehran, said (personal communication, March 13, 2011,
Doha, Qatar):

The
religious foundation and ideology of the regime made this uprising seem against
religion. In other words, it was easy for the Iranian regime to frame any such
uprising as anti-religious and anti-Islamic. Most of the Iranian protesters
were secular, and they were highly affected by Western culture. That's why they
failed to gain the sympathy of the rest of the Iranian society, which is mostly
religious.

In
Iran, "there is little independent basis of organized opposition that can
emanate from within the state...[Any possible source of opposition is] heavily
infiltrated by the secret police and monitored closely by the Basij militia [which are affiliated with
the clerical regime]" (Acuff 2010:229). In 2010, Iran's hard-line officials
affiliated with the clerical regime launched a social networking site that
included videos, images and cartoons making fun of the 2009 protests. "The
site's members seem to be united by little else than the highly ambitious goal
of fighting 'evil,' although there is also space to discuss more prosaic issues
like 'the rule of the supreme jurist' and 'women and family'" (Morozov 2011:134).

This
clerical regime in Iran has succeeded in gaining public support because of its
anti-Western message. "There is nothing that can rally people even behind
unpopular governments more than the fear of a foreign threat...[This fear] has
provided greater space for the [Iranian clerical] regime to consolidate its
rule" (Telhami 2011).

This
fear of Western hegemony might have worked against the process of cyberactivism
(Howard 2011) associated with Iran's "Twitter uprising." This is because western
support of the demonstrations tainted the uprising and gave the regime the
opportunity to blame the protesters for conspiring against Iran's national
unity. Moreover, several pro-regime media accused the West of "trying to foment
a revolution via the Internet" (Morozov 2011:12).

The
censorship and scare tactics operated by the Iranian regime might not have been
the only reason for the failure of Iran's "Twitter uprising." Several observers
argued that the lack of planning on the ground had weakened the social media's
potential to mobilize the public. In this context, Morozov (2009) casted doubts
on Twitter's ability to create real political change on the ground in Iran. "To
ascribe such great importance to Twitter is to disregard the fact that it is
poorly suited to planning protests in a repressive environment like Iran's"
(Morozov 2009:12). According to Morozov, the technology-savvy, pro-Western
Twitter users inside Iran, which he estimated at less than twenty thousand
prior to the protests, failed at connecting with the Iranian public masses,
because "The Iranian opposition did not seem to be well-organized, which might
explain why it eventually fizzled" (Morozov 2011:16).

Echoing
the same thought, Sohrabi-Haghighat (2011) argued that the Twitter uprising
failed in generating "slogans and programs to attract the interest of
low-income groups in urban areas. Apart from the vertical expansion through
social classes...the movement could not extend its horizontal and geographic
reach beyond big cities [in Iran]."

In
this context, Slavash Abghari, an Iranian online activist who lives in Atlanta,
GA, said (e-mail to the authors, April 15, 2011) that:

The
weakness of the 2009 freedom movement in Iran could be attributed to the fact
that the participants in the movement were mostly from the middle class and
failed to connect with the working and lower classes by expressing and
demanding their needs. The working-class members who are suffering from high
unemployment and inflation rate, all of them living below poverty line, are
first concerned about their survival not political freedom. To succeed, the
movement should have engaged the working class too.

According
to Abghari, who runs an English iblog titled "My Homeland" that was hacked by
the Iranian regime in 2009, "the movement couldn't
achieve its immediate goal of freedom, due to the brutality of parallel
security forces and lack of an independent leadership with a clear vision and
strategy."

Morozov's concept of "slacktivism," which was
explained earlier in this study as a "feel-good online activism that has zero
political or social impact," was one of the main characteristics of the Iranian
"Twitter uprising" (Heacock 2009). This "'freedom to scream' online may
actually help regimes by providing a 'political release valve'" (Carafano
2009), which is what happened in the Iranian case.

The
lack of organization on the ground in Iran did not meet the four
characteristics of the SPIN model. The absence of a domestic Iranian civil
society that would lead to the formation of segmented, polycentric and
integrated networks of political activism played a critical role in the failure
of the 2009 protests. Iran's "Green Movement" lacked political groups that
would act "in a strategic thought-out fashion or, at least [speak] with one
voice...Iran's Twitter Revolution may have drowned in its own tweets: There was
just too much digital cacophony for anyone to take decisive action and lead the
crowds" (Morozov 2011:197).

In
this context, Golnaz Esfandiari, the Iranian activist who was quoted earlier,
said in a personal interview with the authors:

The
movement just had symbolic leadership, but it lacked real leadership. People
needed guidance, but they did not find this guidance on the streets. There was
complete chaos with no organized efforts. Also, protesters did not hold to
their grounds on the streets. The symbolic leaders of that movement were
themselves part of the establishment. They included a former prime minister and
a former speaker of the parliament. So, they did not want to bring down the
establishment. They just wanted to change the results of the elections. They
were calling for a new election, but not for the fall of the Khamenei regime.

The
non-hierarchically organized networks that are part of a well-organized
political activism - as called for by the SPIN model - were totally absent in
the Iranian uprising. The Iranian
opposition was so weak that it failed to "break away from the existing system
and present a democratic alternative acceptable to the majority of the
protesters who...[risked] their lives" (Acuff 2010:225). It seemed that the
overall religio-political environment in Iran was not conducive for the success
of the street protests that took place in 2009. The Iranian clerical regime was
more organized than the opposition, and more effective in utilizing social
media. That is why, the impact of the 2009 protests was hardly felt outside the
major Iranian cities, and the pro-regime forces were more than enough to
suppress street activism. In this context, Ali Afshari, an Iranian human
rights and democracy activist living in Washington, D.C. said (personal
communication, Washington, D.C., May 23, 2011):

There
was a lack of organized leadership among the opposition movement, since it
mainly emerged as a reaction to the election fraud that took place, but was not
previously organized in a structured way. Therefore, it was shocked by the role
of the revolutionary guard and the intervention of the supreme religious leader
to change the elections' results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This, coupled
with the lack of a clear strategy and the excessive use of violence and
suppression by the Iranian regime, led to ineffectiveness and chaos.

Assessing the SPIN Model in the so-called Egypt's "Facebook Revolution"

On
January 25, 2011, Egypt witnessed a popular revolution that led to a historic
outcome. On that day, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets,
demanding freedom, justice and an end to corruption. Then their demands were
escalated to reach a point of calling for toppling President Hosni Mubarak who
stayed in power for thirty years. The mass demonstrations started out in Tahrir
Square in the center of Cairo, and then spread throughout various Egyptian
governorates. Despite the fact that the protesters refrained from using
violence, "armies of riot police took up positions on key thoroughfares around
the capital, ready to beat back demonstrators," and using live ammunition and
tear gas canisters against many unarmed civilians (Coker et al. 2011:A12).

After
the failure of police forces to stop the increasing demonstrations, Mubarak
ordered the army to take control of the situation and deploy throughout areas
of tension in Egypt. In the meantime, Mubarak made several concessions by
firing his cabinet and naming a vice president and a possible successor - a
step that the Egyptian public had been calling on him to take for years (Coker
et al. 2011).

Demonstrations
continued despite Mubarak's concessions, and over the course of eighteen days,
the masses defied a nationwide curfew and they were relentless in their demands
in a way that stunned the Mubarak regime. Eventually, Mubarak had no choice but
to step down on February 11, 2011, delegating his powers to the military and
marking a new page in Egypt's history. The fall of Mubarak "was as swift as it
was unexpected...[He] had inherited and shaped a system of patronage, nepotism
and brutality that seemed beyond challenge" (Levinson et al. 2011:A8).

It
was not a surprise that social media played a role in the Egyptian revolution
given the fact that Egypt has been among the pioneering countries in the Middle
East in terms of Internet usage. "Egypt followed Tunisia by linking to the
Internet in late 1993. This was done by the Information and Decision Making
Support Center affiliated to the Egyptian Cabinet." The number of Internet
users in Egypt at the time of writing this paper is approximately 17 million,
which is 21 percent of the population. "The usage growth was 3.691 percent
between 2000 and 2010. All receive the service through 211 Internet Service
Providers" (Rinnawi 2011:126). The number of Egyptian blogs has risen from 40
in 2004 to approximately 160,000 in July 2008 (Internet Filtering in Egypt,
2009). "Although Egypt's Interior Ministry [under Mubarak] maintain[ed] a
department of 45 people to monitor Facebook, nearly 5 million Egyptians use the
social networking site" (Ghannam 2011:5). "That's less than 7 percent of
Egypt's total population. In other words, less than 7 out of every 100
Egyptians are Facebook users" (Vijayan 2011).

Despite
the small number of Egyptians on Facebook, activists used this social media
tool to get their message across and to plan their meeting points on the
streets. That led many observers to describe the Egyptian uprising as the
"Facebook Revolution." One Facebook page was launched before the revolution,
and it played a key role in mobilizing the Egyptian public. This page revolved
around a young Egyptian male - Khaled Said - who was beaten to death in June
2010 on the streets of Alexandria by two police officers after posting a
YouTube video which allegedly revealed police corruption (Khamis and Vaughn
2011). The "We Are All Khaled Said" page attracted close to a half-a-million
followers, and it "became a rallying point for a campaign against police
brutality. For many Egyptians, it revealed details of the extent of torture in
their country" (Profile: Egypt's Wael Ghonim 2011).

The
social media role in the Egyptian revolution was suspended on January 27, 2011,
after the Egyptian regime's unmatched step of shutting down the Internet
service and cutting the mobile service in the whole country. Despite the fact
that the Internet blackout lasted for six days, during which the country was
totally isolated from the virtual world, "protest organizers were able to bring
out larger crowds than ever using flyers and leaflets, word of mouth, and
mosques as centers for congregation" (Baiasu 2011).

The
protesters' ability to carry on with their activities on the ground during the
height of the revolution without social media could be attributed to a
well-organized Egyptian civil society that had been active for years before the
revolution despite pressures from the Mubarak regime.

The
Egyptian civil society under the Mubarak regime was subject to state laws that
curtailed its functionality. Still, the decade that preceded the revolution had
witnessed waves of protests and "cycle[s] of contestation," that were
instigated by "the continuing structural crises of the Egyptian economy and
state system, which had long since alienated the mass of the population"
(El-Mahdi 2009:96).

In
2000, the first wave of political activism was exemplified in a series of
street protests that took place on many Egyptian university campuses in support
of the second Palestinian uprising. Then, a second wave of protests took place
in 2003 against the U.S. invasion of Iraq (El-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009). In
2004, a third and massive-scale cycle of contestation started when activists
from various political backgrounds and affiliations came together and formed
"The Egyptian Movement for Change," whose slogan was "Kifaya" (English for Enough). This movement, which included
Islamists, Liberals, and Socialists, among others, called on Mubarak not to run
for a fifth term and rejected the possibility of his son Gamal succeeding him.

During
the months that preceded the 2005 presidential elections, Kifaya
organized "a host of public activities - demonstrations, campus rallies,
meetings and marches." It came up with new ways to contest the authorities.
(El-Mahdi 2009:89-90). The rise of Kifaya coincided with the emergence
of a vibrant group of online activists and bloggers who documented the regime's
brutalities, particularly police torture and human rights' violations (El-Mahdi
2009). Kifaya utilized the bloggers' help to disseminate its message,
but its main activities took place on the ground. It had a "horizontal structure" (El-Mahdi 2009:91)
that invested in the talents and energies of its members who belonged to
different factions, yet they were united in a coalition movement that called
for an end to the Mubarak regime.

This
horizontal nature of Kifaya,that organically connected its
members who held different ideologies, exemplified the SPIN model, where
"multiple hubs" (Bennett 2003) of segmented, polycentric movements are
collectively integrated into a network of "nonhierarchical social linkages"
with shared understandings among the ideologically-diverse participants
(Gerlach 2001:295).

Additionally, in 2006 a group of judges
organized public sit-ins and protests to call for the independence of the
judiciary system. This was "an unprecedented development in which dissent came
from within the core structures of the state itself " (El-Mahdi 2009:99).

Furthermore,
over the course of 2008, hundreds of thousands of workers collectively
participated in huge strikes and protests. Then, a couple young activists
started a Facebook group, calling for a general strike on April 6, 2008. As a
result of this call, a massive strike took place and "drew in an unusually
broad array of formal and informal opposition groups...[along with] state
workers...independent journalists, and university professors" (Ottaway and
Hamzawy 2011). A movement known as "April 6" was formed in the immediate
aftermath of this call, and it included activists and bloggers belonging to
several ideological schools, thus exemplifying the same spirit that existed in Kifaya.
Egypt continued to witness workers' protests over the course of 2009 and 2010.

None
of the abovementioned movements could "claim a decisive victory. But together
they have succeeded in changing the agenda for political action under
conditions of sustained authoritarianism" (El-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009:10).
Moreover, they were effective in mobilizing the Egyptian public and building up
a strong momentum for the 2011 revolution. These movements were organized in a
way that created "shared communities of protest" and revitalized "an
environment of public dissent" (El-Mahdi 2009:96).

As
mentioned earlier, the SPIN model was evident in most of the civil society
movements in Egypt, but the best exemplification for it was witnessed during
the 2011 revolution. The revolution started out with small demonstrations that
grew bigger. No particular group or movement led or claimed exclusive
responsibility for these demonstrations. "Though small, [these] organizing
groups were clearly effective in bringing people to the streets who had never
engaged in political activity a day in their lives. While organizers did meet
in person, social media was sometimes a safer way to interact and plan" (Baiasu
2011).

The
SPIN model calls for collective action, group coordination and organized
division of labor among members of various groups. All these characteristics
were featured at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution. Esraa
Abdel-Fattah, a political activist and
co-founder of the April 6 group, said (personal
communication, February 13, 2011, Cairo, Egypt) right
after Mubarak's falling: "Members from all the youth political groups were
protesting at Tahrir Square...It was a perfect division of labor among the
protesters. It was a whole life at the square."

The
young activists whose organizations participated in the revolution formed the
Coalition of the Revolution's Youth. With approximately 50,000 members on its
Facebook page, it served "as a forum for discussion and an umbrella movement
that will try to crystallize specific demands...Suggestions made online [through
Facebook] are taken up and discussed at face-to-face meetings, both in the
capital and in the governorates" (Eissa 2011).

This coalition is an embodiment
of the SPIN model at its best. The segmented and polycentric youth movements
that formed this coalition overcomed their differences and formed an organized
network to channel the demands raised during the revolution. This coalition's
participants captured the core of Gerlach's SPIN model in that they "are not
only linked internally, but with other movements whose participants share
attitudes and values. Through these links, a movement can draw material
support, recruit new supporters, and expand coordination for joint action"
(Gerlach 2001:296).

Conclusion

Despite
the fact that social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, played a
critical role in the political upheavals that have been taking place in the
Middle East, we cannot assume a relationship of causality between social media
and political revolutions. This study shows that social media can potentially
contribute to political revolution, but only under certain circumstances. There
needs to be a complex network of events, forces, and people in order for social
media to be effective in political change.

In
considering the relationship between social media and political revolutions, we
have to acknowledge the differences in content and capability among various
forms of social media. For example, while Facebook allows for rich information
and a high level of sustained interaction among its users, Twitter has the
potential to reach a broader audience at a faster pace compared to Facebook.
These differences between Facebook and Twitter were exemplified in their use by
activists in Egypt and Iran.

The
comparison between the Internet role in Egypt's 2011 revolution and Iran's 2009
uprising showed that political realism is more functional than cyber-utopianism
in assessing the role of social media role in public mobilization. The Iranian
protesters' inability to change the course of the 2009 elections, "let alone
spark a revolution, should remind us that utopian interpretations of technology
and social movements often run into a hard reality. Using the criteria of
existing theories of revolution, it is clear that Iran was - and remains - far
from reaching the requisite threshold of a political or social revolution"
(Acuff 2010:226).

In
the context of political realism, the SPIN model was more applicable to the
Egyptian revolution than the Iranian uprising. This could be linked to four
major differences between both cases. First, while the Iranian protesters were
disorganized and failed to attract large numbers of people, the Egyptian
segmented groups, which were part of civil society, were able to integrate,
network and act in unison despite their polycentric nature and the disparities
in their ideologies. Mohammed Ali Mohtadi, the Iranian thinker quoted earlier,
said in the same interview with the authors that: "The uprising that erupted in
Iran was launched by certain and limited factions of the upper and middle
classes of the Iranian society. This was very different from the Egyptian
revolution, which involved all factions of the society, such as the elite, the
youth and the laborers." The fact that the percentage of Internet users in
Egypt is way less than that in Iran, as previously mentioned, yet the Egyptian
revolution succeeded in toppling the regime, indicates that the social media
need a strong civil society in order for them to function effectively. This is
also important given the reality that the Internet service in Egypt was
suspended by the Mubarak regime for more than a week during the 18-day
revolution, yet political movements succeeded in mobilizing themselves on the
streets without the use of social media during that time.

Second,
a lot of the activists who were the mobilizing force behind the Iranian
uprising were opposition groups operating in the diaspora outside of Iran,
while this was not the case in Egypt, where the opposition groups were all
active locally. This is closely related to the previous point, since local
groups are more capable of on the ground organization and attracting a wide
base of popular support.

Third, the level of sophistication of the
Iranian government in combating the opposition's cyberactivism efforts was much
more than the Egyptian government, since the Iranian regime was not only more
technologically savvy than its Egyptian counterpart, but was also more prepared
and more proactive, rather than reactive, in countering activism, both online
and offline.

Fourth,
in Egypt the struggle was against a clearly corrupt and visibly oppressive
regime, but in Iran the regime acquires a large part of its legitimacy from the
religious theocracy that is ruling the country, which makes it much harder to
shake this regime or to fight against it, thus limiting the effectiveness of
opposition movements, both online as well as on the streets.

Therefore,
the authors can safely conclude that social media cannot automatically or
single-handedly launch a revolution. "This is not to say that social networks
don't matter; they matter a lot. But they do not incarnate freedom, do not
bring about some final, heaven-like stage of human history" (Rieff 2011). In
order for social media to be effective in initiating change, they have to be
complemented by an active civil society, with well-organized political groups
and networks that fit the characteristics of the SPIN model. If these groups
exist on the ground, social media can serve as tools for accelerating public
mobilization. This well-organized civil society that is conducive for political
change existed in Egypt, but not in Iran.

It
must be acknowledged that not all protests can lead to revolution. The protests
that took place in Egypt in January 2011 were of the confrontational,
revolutionary nature that led to toppling the regime, but the protests that
took place in Iran in 2009 were less confrontational with the regime, as they
were not backed up by a strong support system of organizational networks in the
real world. Therefore, we need to be cautious in our assessment of the role of social
media in political mobilization to avoid falling in the trap of technological
determinism or cyber-utopianism. Rather, we have to bear in mind that "Social
media are often a useful compliment to the kinds of activism" that take place
in the offline world" (Jones 2011), but they are not a decisive factor in
determining the outcomes of uprisings and revolutions. In Egypt, unlike in
Iran, the decisive factor was the on-the-ground organized networking that
emulated the SPIN model. At the end of the day, the success or failure of
political movements depends primarily on political activism in the real world,
rather than merely cyberactivism in the virtual world.

About the authors

Mohammed el-Nawawy is a Knight-Crane Chair and Associate Professor in the Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte. Sahar Khamis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at University of Maryland.

Burns, Alex, and Ben Eltham 2009. Twitter Free Iran: An
Evaluation of Twitter's Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in
Iran's 2009 Election Crisis. In
Record of Communication Policy and Research Forum. Pp. 322-334. Sydney:
University of Technology. http://eprints.vu.edu.au/15230/ Accessed:
June 10, 2011.

Carreiro, Andrew and Faiza Hirji 2009. Different Opinions on the
Use of Social Media in the Iran Election Protests of 2009. McMaster University,
November 27, 2009. http://scurvydesign.com/tag/iran/.
Accessed: June 10, 2011.

Khamis,
Sahar and Kathryn Vaughn 2011. 'We are all Khaled Said': The
potentials and limitations
of cyberactivism in triggering public mobilization and promoting political
change. Journal of Arab & Muslim
Media Research 4(2&3):139-157.